Do vegetables actually exist? What's
so spicy about vanilla and avocados? What time should dinner technically
be? We've assembled a hodgepodge of snackable word origins on this
episode of Words Unravelled. Welcome to another Words Unravelled! I'm
Rob Watts from the YouTube channel RobWords, and I'm Jess Zafarris, author of the etymology
books Words from Hell and Once Upon a Word. Today on Words Unravelled, we have an edible
assortment of etymology facts for you. Yes, we are in tasty territory with some
delicious, delectable food words. I think we should start with what they say
around here, at least, is the most important meal of the day—the one that begins the day.
Can you tell us a little bit about breakfast? I certainly can. Breakfast is one of those words
where, if you just pronounce it differently, it becomes immediately clear what it means. We
say it "breakfast," but it is "break fast" as it's written, and that is simply what it means.
It's to break the fast of the night. You didn't eat for a few hours whilst you were sleeping away,
but now you're up, and you're going to break that fast. But it hasn't actually always only meant
the first meal of the day. Breakfast could refer to any meal you've had where you haven't eaten
for a while. I think William Shakespeare uses it in *Two Gentlemen of Verona*. Let me find
a quote—I've got it here somewhere. Yeah, he says, "I would have been a break fast to the
beast." There's also a quote from John Dryden in one of his poems who says, "The wolves will
get a break fast by my death." So basically, if anyone's a bit starving and they get a morsel
to eat, they've broken their fast—they've had breakfast. And if you're a hobbit, you
must have second breakfast, of course. Indeed! Actually, we should go into the various
different meals that, at one time at least, made up an Englishman or woman's day because there were
so many of them. You could talk about breakfast, lunch, elevenses, second breakfast if you like,
supper, afternoon tea, high tea. These are all separate things. The amount of food that must have
been consumed on English country estates in the past is extraordinary. My understanding is people
ate smaller meals throughout the day rather than three, and of course, this depended on your class.
If you were of a higher level, like the leisure class, you probably ate a little more throughout
the day than if you were working in the fields. Yes, little and often, I'd say. Little and
often. For example, elevenses was just a little sort of snack that you would have at
around 11:00 in the morning while waiting between your breakfast and your lunch. There was
also fourses, which I don't know exactly what they used to have in England, but they still have
this in France. They call it quatre-heures, and it's a little sweet snack that you
have at around 4:00 in the afternoon. Oh, very nice! I like that. That's cute,
isn't it? That's a great time to have a snack—4:00 is perfect. That's exactly when I
always get hungry. I live with a French lady; my wife is French, and whenever she has her
little nibble at 4:00 on a snack of some form, I think, "Yeah, okay, I could have a
chocolate biscuit too. Let's do it." Tell me, do supper and dinner mean
the same thing where you're from? No, they do not. Oh, interesting! Tell me the difference,
because those words are interchangeable for me. Well, okay, so it depends on your class, like so
much in England. It depends also on whether you're in the north of England or the south of England.
I don't know quite how it works in Scotland and Wales. It's a bit different. But certainly in
England, you have to bring in tea as well as dinner and supper. So where I'm from, we call
the latest meal of the day "tea," which isn't insane because one of the old meals of the day
used to be high tea, which would be eaten around 6:00 or so. That is kind of your tea time, as
we call it. Dinner is considered a more proper word for food at that time of the day, and in the
north, you can sometimes say your lunchtime meal is your dinner. I know people, posh people, who
refer to their later meal of the day as supper. Although when I was growing up, supper was
something you would have after your dinner, a little bit later, just before you go
to bed to satiate yourself. But I have to bring in something here—something very
interesting about the word "dinner." The word "dinner," etymologically speaking, is
supposed to be the first meal of the day. Interesting! Yes, why is that? Well, here's an interesting thing. So breakfast
in French is "déjeuner," right? And in Spanish, it is "desayuno." Both of these words
mean to break your fast as well, right? So you've got the "dé" in "déjeuner" and
the "des" in the Spanish word "desayuno," meaning the negative of "jeûner," which is to fast. But
they both come from the same root as the word "dîner." They have the same Latin root. These two
words—the French are breaking their fast twice, both with their "déjeuner" and their
"dîner," which is what they now call their latest meal of the day. However,
"dinner" in both French and English has been moving further and further back in
the day since the very earliest times that the word was being used. It went from being
breakfast to being lunch to being a later meal. Well, I suppose we needed a distinction, right?
Since it's implying that as long as you're not constantly eating throughout the day, every time
you take a break, you have to have a breakfast. Yeah, well, what it is is it came
to mean the first big meal of the day. As that meaning came along, it
started to be pushed back by changes in human behavior and societal behavior.
This meant that first, it got pushed to around what we now call lunchtime. But
then, around the Industrial Revolution, when it became less practical to have a big meal
either in the morning or during your lunch break, it became the evening meal instead. So it's
just been getting further and further back. That would also, I imagine, correlate with
technology that allows more indoor lighting or better indoor lighting for your average person.
You have the opportunity to have nighttime meals where you're not sitting in the dark or
need extra candles or fire or whatever else. That's an excellent point. I hadn't even thought
of that, for sure. This reminds me—given the fact that you've brought up a French-derived word
in contrast to a Germanic-derived word—we have a lot of differences introduced by the class
dynamics of the Normans coming into Britain and replacing words for meals, formerly words for
meals with French-derived words. For example, we've got the Germanic terms for animals: pig,
cow, chicken. But then, once it's on the plate, the ruling-class Norman plate, it becomes a
French-derived word like pork, beef, and poultry. Yeah, that's one of the linguists' favorites, that
one, because it's the best possible illustration of the class dynamics between the Anglo-Saxons
and the Normans. When they arrived and when William the Conqueror came over and replaced all
of the existing nobility with his French pals, or his Norman pals, though they wouldn't
have called themselves French back then, but the French-speaking pals anyway. Then we get
this huge flood of French words into English, and it never really stops, does it? Of course, but we still have, because I
think it's one of the more fundamental things that we experience as humans,
a lot of Germanic-derived food words, especially for the basics like
bread and meat and such, right? Yeah, and you mentioned the word "meat." Meat has
undergone a transformation as a word, hasn't it? That's right. It was a word in
Old English for any type of food, any type of nourishment. It could also
be animal food. Food itself means fuel and nourishment as much as it does food.
Meat could also be a word for a meal, and originally it's from a root meaning
moist or wet, which I don't super love. Everyone's always hating on the word moist.
That's called a word aversion, and about 20% of people share the word aversion to the word
moist, apparently. I'm not one of them, but... I am. No, I quite like it. Oh, I said that in a slightly
creepy way, didn't I? In any case, meat became a word for flesh,
essentially, which was more the word that you would hear in association with what
we would call meat today. In the 1300s, interestingly, what we now call meat
was referred to as "flesh-meat." We talked before about how a butcher was known as
a "flesh-monger," and that's much more in line with the German and the Dutch words for meat,
which are basically just "flesh." But also, vegetables were called "green meat," and
dairy products were called "white meat." I like that. That is so interesting. I like that.
It feels like a kenning, but it's not quite. Like a what? A kenning, like in the metaphorical Old English
terms that you find in *Beowulf* and such, like calling the sea the "whale-road" or
calling your brain your "brain-locker." All right, I genuinely didn't know
there was a word for that. I like that. Isn't that neat? Basically, the words that we
have for food today, the most basic kinds of food, including bread—that was also not quite the
word that we use today. It was a word for a crumb or a morsel, but also bread in general.
The root there means to bubble or to boil, referring to the rising of yeast. Yeast
also means to froth or bubble. But the more common word for food, as in our daily bread, was
still, again, meat, which is kind of interesting. That is interesting. In any case, to make this more confusing, bread
occasionally is recorded as a word for meat, as in the term "sweetbreads," which refers
to the pancreas of an animal used for food. The bread element in "sweetbreads" might
not be related to the word bread. It might instead be related to another very similar
Old English word meaning flesh. So we have a lot of confusion between bread,
meat, and flesh all over the place. But bread does fold into a lot of English words, like "company" and "companion," from the Latin
word for bread. That's someone you share bread with. The same Latin root is in "panini" and
"empanada" and "pantry." There's another word in English that also means someone you eat your
bread with, and that is "lord," because the Old English was "loaf-ward." So yeah, someone
who looked after your bread. Meanwhile, a lady was literally a "bread maid" or a
"bread maker," someone who kneads bread. "Kneads" with a K, or "needs"
like I need something? Not desires or requires, but in fact
massages. While we're on bread, something that I found surprising while researching
this was the fact that "meal," so flour, for example, what you might make
bread with, that word isn't actually related to the word "meal" as in a repast,
a time of day when you eat a thing. Oh, that's neat. Is one of them from
"grind" and then the other one from "time"? Right, something along those lines. You got it. That's exactly what it is.
Yeah, so the one that is flour, as you might expect, is the one that is grind. So, meal
is directly related to the word "to mill," like, you know, a windmill where you would actually
make the stuff, or a miller would make the stuff. And then, yes, the meal time—so when we say "meal
time," we're actually being somewhat tautologist because the word meal comes from a Germanic root
that does mean time. And actually, anyone who speaks German will know that the word "Mal" means
time now. So, if you want to say "once" in German, you say "einmal," "one time," "zweimal,"
"two times," or if you want something again, you say "noch einmal," which means "another time."
And that's where our word "meal" comes from. I thought that was surprising that
they have converged in spelling, as we sometimes see in English—blame the Vowel
Shift probably. They've converged in spelling, they're in related fields, but
they're not actually related words. There's got to be some folk
etymology influence there, I'm sure, where one impacts
the spelling of the other. Yeah, it's entirely likely. In fact, folk
etymology, I suspect, is going to come up quite a lot while we talk about food words because this
"daily bread," these things that people have very often, people do tend to influence how the names
for those things change, for better or worse. Speaking of meal times, we
haven't talked about lunch yet. Oh, we haven't, have we? Okay, I can tell you about lunch. There's a
bit of a mystery about lunch, you know. Oh my goodness, we don't know which
came first, lunch or luncheon? It's always been assumed that luncheon
is a sort of extension of the word lunch along the lines of punch and punching and
trunch and trunching, I think. Anyway, the problem with that theory is that the
first citation has the word luncheon, not the word lunch. So, that would suggest
that lunch is a shortening of luncheon. Oh, that's interesting. And
that's a relatively recent word, right? Before that, we had "nuncheon,"
which meant like noon-draft or noon cup of ale or whatever, or tea,
that came before luncheon. Yes, evidently. It's a Middle
English word, and I want to say luncheon didn't show up until the 1600s. That's interesting, isn't it? So, I would have guessed if you told me that
nuncheon was a word, I'd have gone, "Oh, that's a brunch-style portmanteau of a noon
luncheon," but it actually comes first. It's really a noon drink even, yeah. And it's
probable that luncheon was modeled after nuncheon, so technically speaking, luncheon should
just be drinking rather than eating. By the way, what does lunch supposedly mean? It means lump. A lump of food, right?
Lunch is to lump what hunch is to hump. Really?
And bunch is to bump. Oh, I love this. I love this. It's good stuff, isn't it? I love those correlations. It's like true and
truth and grow and growth and dear and dearth. Mhm. Well, this leads me onto a really
good one then, a very, very relevant one, one that we should have already covered by
now, and that is the word "food" itself. Ooh, the very theme of the episode. Indeed. So, food is to feed what blood
is to bleed and brood is to breed. So, food is the means by which one gets fed. It's
obviously related to the word "fodder" as well, and surprisingly, it's related to the word
"foster" as well, which originally meant to feed. I would not have guessed that one. No, you can sort of read foster as the word
food with a suffix on the end—that "-ster," which is like a, I think, a Middle English
suffix. It might be an Old English one, not sure. Old words for food related to that
food, "noth" was an old word for your actual food, which you can sort of read as being like
foodstuff. And also, there was an old term that was "waybread," which I really like, which is a
term for food that you take with you on a journey. Ah, I was hearing that as "W-H-E-Y" and wondering
if it had anything to do with curds or cheese, but I prefer "waybread." That's interesting. I
would like to take waybread with me on a hike. Well, one of my favorite words here in Germany, they have the word "Wegbier," which means "way
beer," and it is the bottle of beer that you take with you for the journey on your way to
go and drink some more beer somewhere else. Critically important. Very important word. We should talk about a few other food groups.
We've gotten into bread, we've gotten into meat, but let's talk about fruit and vegetables
and whether vegetables exist at all. What do you mean? I mean, I wish they didn't, but they
do. There's a lot of discourse online right now about whether vegetables exist
because there isn't a scientific standard definition of a vegetable versus, like,
plants that we eat can be categorized as fruits and berries, but there isn't a standard,
like, this thing is categorizable as a vegetable. So, the whole tomato fruit versus veggie
debate is a little bit moot, though. A tomato is a berry, by the way. What? No, it's not. It totally is. What do you mean, a strawberry?
But a strawberry is not a berry. Yeah, that's because it's got
its seeds on the outside, right? I know that much. Hold on. Right. Okay, so
tomato, it goes in the salad, but not a fruit salad. It is a vegetable,
but it's not. Everybody knows that. As a southerner, I would defy anyone
to say that something can't go into a salad because I live in the same land
where Ambrosia is a food and a salad, and it's made of coconut flakes
and marshmallows and canned fruit. Marshmallows in a salad? Yes. Ambrosia salad. Highly recommend
looking it up. It's horrible, but I do remember liking it when I was a kid. Probably. It's named after the food of the gods. It is, indeed. The word "ambrosia" means
literally "immortal" or "that which is not dying." I didn't know that. Yeah, although an interesting
link to that definition. Sorry, just as an aside, but you
know the French word for meat is "viande," and that comes from the
Latin for "thing that is living." Ooh, interesting. See, that seems more specific
than the word that we have, which is very vague, etymologically speaking. Anyway, the tricky part
about vegetables is that, etymologically speaking, it's a little murky there too. You know,
in guessing games, you still hear "animal, vegetable, or mineral," right? Those are the three
categories of things that can exist and be guessed in the world. That's because the literal and first
recorded meaning of vegetable was originally an adjective. That "able" ending is just like
"valuable" or "comfortable." But a vegetable is something that is capable of life or growing,
and the Latin root "vegetari" means to animate or to bring alive. So, vegetables and meat—we're
all on the same page in terms of something living. Does that make us all vegetables then? I mean, technically speaking,
well, okay, if we're animal, vegetable, or mineral, I think we're
probably animal, but close enough. Yeah, but there's an argument to be
made that we're minerals as well, right? Oh, right, but by the most literal interpretation,
I think a thing that's capable of life is a vegetable. So we are all technically vegetables.
We are veget-able. And we've talked about this a little bit. Speaking of edible foods and
such, we've talked about the fact that apples are basically the ultimate word for any kind of
fruit. The word "apple" was simply the word for fruit back in the day, so it tends to turn up a
lot in the origins of other words. Like a date was originally called a "finger apple," which
is also funny because the word "date" is from the Greek "dactylos," also meaning
finger, which is very creepy and very fun. It's satisfying in its own way, yeah. Right, right. And then cucumbers
were earth apples. Chamomile comes from a Greek word meaning earth apple
or an apple on the ground. I'm assuming that chamomile and melon are calling upon
the same word meaning apple there, right? That's right. The word "peach" was
adapted via French from the Latin "malum persicum," meaning Persian apple, which is neat. Oh, that's cool. And then a pomegranate literally
means an apple with many seeds, from the Latin "pomum granatum."
It's related to the word "grenade." I think I only just found out that—I
should not boast about my own ignorance, but I only just found out that
tangerine means fruit from Tangier. That is interesting, isn't it? Yeah, I think we covered that
briefly on the color episode. Did we mention it? We may have, we may not.
Maybe it ended up on the cutting room floor, but I think we alluded to it at some point. Yeah, I'm sure we did, actually.
Another fruit with a bit of an interesting backstory—avocado, very popular. Oh, it's a fruit, right? Ah, yeah, okay, just checking because the
lines have suddenly become very blurred. I came into this knowing what a fruit and a
vegetable were, but now I suddenly don't. Avocado is the same word as the Spanish
for lawyer, as in advocate, and that is just a nice bit of folk etymology. People heard
the Aztec word, which I cannot pronounce and I'm not going to attempt to pronounce, and
couldn't make any more of it than I could, and so they thought, "Well,
it sounds a bit like avocado, so let's call them avocado." But that
Aztec word meant—what did it mean, Jess? It meant testicle. It meant testicle, yes. It meant that
fruit as well, but it also meant—also funny classification-wise because
avocados are technically berries, so it is metaphorically berries
and metaphorically looks like a gentleman's berries. And that links it to the word
"orchid," which comes from the Greek for testicle. Right. I love that. Yeah. So, what I think is interesting about the
evolution of the word "avocado" is it's not quite known whether the word simply became homophones
as a result of the difference between lawyer and advocate and avocado—the adaptation—whether
it's folk etymology, just mishearing, or whether it's an intentional snarky comparison
between lawyers and testicles that kind of stuck around as a result of that. Another neat thing
here is that the Nahuatl word, the Aztec word, which is pronounced similarly, and I'm going
to have trouble getting the consonants right, but it's pronounced something like "ahuacatl,"
and the word "ahuacamolli" meant avocado soup, avocado sauce, and that's where we get the word
guacamole. But it's all from the same word. So, avocado and guacamole are from the very
same Aztec word, which is very cool. That is very cool. So, you feel like you're
saying two completely different words, they have almost no shared letters it seems,
and then they come from exactly the same place. By the way, more folk etymology relating to the
avocado—sometimes it gets called the alligator pear, which again is just folk etymology, people
not being able to really handle the original word, thinking, "Well, it sounds a bit like
alligator," and then people kind of pick up that ball and run with it. Pick up the
ball and run with it, is that the phrase? Yes, I think that is. Then people pick up that ball, or that testicle, and run with it because, you know, it
can be green and kind of rough like an— Yeah, it's like scaly. I think that one
makes a lot of sense. It does look like an alligator, a pear with alligator skin.
It's also been called a butter fruit before, which I think is neat because, you know, it's
got that nice buttery inside. A similar word that went through kind of a funny naming twist is the
pineapple, which is also related to the pine cone, which is super interesting. English is one of
the only Indo-European languages that doesn't use a variation of the word "ananas"
to mean pineapple. In Middle English, the word pineapple was a word for a pine
cone because it looks like an apple on the tree. That makes a lot more sense, really, than
pineapple necessarily, but the connection here is when a pineapple grows, it looked to European
eyes like a pine cone growing on its plant. So, yeah, it is the fruit—the apple—the fruit
of the pine tree, so it's the pine apple. Interestingly, "ananas" is not related
to the word "banana." Bananas, rather, are from an African language, probably Wolof,
spoken in Senegal and Gambia. Its origin and exact meaning are unknown, but it's thought
to mean something like fingertip or finger. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of
obvious. When they're growing on the bunch, they do look like a curled-up hand,
don't they? You would think they would pick the ruder name for
that fruit, but they did not. I can give you another rude one, though,
if you like, if you're feeling aggrieved. I always want another rude one, you know. Vanilla is kind of... Oh, yes, this is one of my favorites! I love it. So, there's no way around it,
really. It means "little vagina." It does, it does, it does. It means—because a
vagina is also like a Latin euphemism for that particular part. It's funny that we use that as a
very scientific and technical term, but it's just another euphemism borrowed from another language
because it was a word for any kind of pod or any sheath—anything that could hold another thing,
for obvious reasons. Then in Spanish, it became "vainilla," like little pod, and then, yeah,
that's how it came back to English as vanilla. That's exactly it. I stole your
thunder on that one, I apologize. It's one of my favorite words. I knew it was going to be right up your street. I would have
been amazed if you didn't already know it. You seek them here, you seek them there,
you find those genitals everywhere. Everywhere! Oh, excellent. All right,
let's see, why did I do a song? Let's do this the other way around: words
that have food implications in them, even though we don't necessarily use them
to be related to food today. Like, the word "precocious," for example, means developing or
literally precooked—like before your time. So, a precocious child is precooked,
which I think is super interesting. Oh, it's like a variant on immaturity. Yes, exactly. It's cooked a little too
soon. There are also a whole bunch of words that are related to random assortments
of things that originally came from food. Like "hodgepodge" was originally a dish. It's
been part of English since the 14th century, but the word has a bunch of variations.
There was hotchpot, hotch pot, and hog pot, and it was basically any type of stew. I found
a couple of different recipes for them from the 14th century. Sometimes it's made with goose,
spices, and wine; sometimes it's a bunch of other things. Then there's "potpourri," which was
borrowed from French in the 1600s. Today, it's any kind of medley or collection of things or
the smelly stuff in your grandma's bathroom. But potpourri in French literally means "rotten
pot," which is so interesting. It probably implies food that's been sitting in a stew for
a long time—not necessarily rotten, but having the flavors melding together. It may also be a
misunderstanding of the Spanish "olla podrida," which is the Spanish national soup and also
interestingly means "rotten pot" literally for a similar reason—it's cooked for a long time.
One more of those interesting words for random assortments, which is a nice addition to your
lexical treasure box if you have not come across it before—and I've heard this pronounced two
different ways, so maybe I can be educated as to which one is correct—is "gallimaufry" or
"galimafree," which is a word for a confused jumble or medley of things. It comes from French
and was a word for a hash or a dish made of odds and ends. It's a compound word composed of French
words meaning "to make merry" and "to eat a lot," so eating and making merry are all combined
in that one word, which I think is lovely. I've been sort of dabbling in a bit of Swedish,
and I came across the word "smörgås" the other day—I'm definitely pronouncing it wrongly—but it
means sandwich. Then I realized, oh, "smörgåsbord" means sandwich board! That's quite satisfying.
And, of course, I'm sure most of our listeners know at this point the origin of the word
"sandwich" itself—from a particular person, right? Yes, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of
Sandwich, who was something of a bounder, I think one could say. The story goes
that during a 24-hour gambling session, he demanded to have food brought to him—meat
between two slices of, by the way, toasted bread. Ooh, now there, the revelation to me is
the fact that that bread was toasted, because to me, that means what we're
calling a toasted sandwich should, in fact, be a sandwich, and we should be calling
all the other sandwiches non-toasted sandwiches. Interesting. In the dialects that I speak,
there is no specification one way or another; you just tell people whether you want it toasted. Ah, there you go. But, I mean, there's
no chance whatsoever that he was the first person to do this, but yeah, this
story popularized it at least among some people. Although I would say that the
idea that he was gambling during this 24-hour session is subject to some controversy.
There are relatives, potentially descendants, who would say that he was not what everyone says
he is. Although it was said of him, "Seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished
so little," so I get the feeling he could have been the type. Maybe he deserved it a little
bit. You can't libel someone who's dead, right? Let's see, should we talk through some interesting
dish and food word origins that we've come across? By all means. For example, I suppose since we
mentioned that avocado is from an Aztec language, I think it's pretty interesting
that tomato is also from the same language. Tomatoes weren't introduced to
Europe until after the age of conquest, so to speak, and the word "tomato" in that
same language means "the swelling fruit." Right. Is chocolate as well
from the same language? I believe so, yes. And that was just
a drink, wasn't it—chocolate, I think? Yes, and then potatoes also weren't brought to
Europe until after European cultures started the age of imperialism. Slightly before
that, "potato" is from the Haitian word "batata," which meant sweet potato originally.
Originally, all potatoes were sweet potatoes, and then later the white potato was cultivated.
Sweet potatoes, although they look like potatoes, are not closely related. For several centuries,
sweet potatoes were called "common potatoes" because they were more popular, while white
potatoes, which were considered lower quality, were grown in North America and were called
"bastard potatoes" or "Virginia potatoes." Bastard potatoes are sweet
potatoes tubers as well, I believe. Yes, I think that's the distinction.
I had to look up what a tuber was. It's a bulbous growth below ground on a plant.
It's also fascinating how many words essentially mean "salted." The word "pasta," for example,
means salted in Greek and Latin. "Pasta" was a word for any type of dough, pastry, paste, or
porridge but was meant to imply a salted or seasoned mass of food. "Pastrami" is from
the same root. "Salami" is from the Latin word "sal," meaning salt, but also "salsa,"
"sauce," and "salad" are from the same root. And "sausage," I think, as well. I think so, yeah. All things that have been cured
or brined. Salad isn't necessarily brined now, but it was originally a word for
brined vegetables, and then later was extended to any mixture of vegetables.
And this is the point where we mentioned that Roman soldiers were supposedly paid
with salt, right? That's how they got their salary. I don't know if that's one of those
things that's not actually a fact, though. Yeah, that one I’ve always
had a dash of suspicion for, so I should look that up.
Someone will tell us, I'm sure. What other food words do you have on
your mind? What else is on the menu? Bacon, by the way. Bacon was also a more vague
term than it currently is. It comes from a Germanic root meaning "back" or, if you want to
stretch the meaning, "ass." So, when we say back bacon, which is the type of bacon that's preferred
in England—I've noticed you like streaky bacon in the States, but in Britain, we like back bacon.
I think it's a bit more sort of meaty, a bit less fatty. But that’s interesting in itself because
bacon actually comes from a word meaning "back," and the same root as the word "back," as
you would expect. It went through meaning quite vaguely "pork," and then eventually it
narrowed down and became specifically bacon. The edible parts of a pig are very geographically
confused because the pork butt is also the shoulder, and there are a bunch of other things.
So, the pork butt is the shoulder cut, I believe. Is this another of your depraved
American foods—pork butt? Oh, do you not have this word? I’ve never heard of it. I believe the implication is that it’s a big lump, kind of like a butt is a cask. So, it’s a
large, heavy cut of meat that you cook. Like, I cooked a pork butt on my smoker the
other day and turned it into carnitas. That actually sounds quite nice. Yeah, it was. I made half of it into carnitas
and the other half into Southern-style barbecue. Oh, I’m actually getting really hungry
now. How much longer have we got to do? Almost done. Let's see, a couple more to whet your appetite before you go. Did you
know that calzone means trouser leg, apparently because a folded calzone looks a
little bit like a folded pair of trousers? Or that it’s rolled over for some reason? This
is debated, so that’s a maybe on that one. Yeah, while we're talking about Italian food,
lasagna supposedly originally comes from the Greek word for chamber pot—a pot to do your business
in. It passed through Latin, and the Romans used the word to mean a cooking pot. Lasagna is named
after the pot that it was originally cooked in. That makes sense. A lot of dishes are named
after the dishes in which they’re cooked, like pot roast and things, and pot pies. Casserole is one. Casserole is a French actual dish—physical dish. Apparently, a bit of a mystery in terms
of why it’s called this is the word taco, which comes from a word for wadding,
like you would put into a rifle. My guess, and I haven’t seen this confirmed, is
that the wadding sense makes sense because it implies something that’s light and fills up
your tube, I guess, so to speak. But in Spanish, it wasn’t a word specifically for the folded taco
that we eat, but any kind of light lunch. That happened to be a popular light lunch, and then it
was extended or made more specific for that dish. Well, have we sufficiently filled
our tubes? Have we satiated? Have we done the etymology of food words? I think so. I think we're there. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jess. You
teach me so much during these podcasts. Likewise. We could go for hours on food, I’m
sure, so maybe we’ll do a part two of this at another time or later this season.
Let us know what word origins and food origins you know and which ones you want
to know about, and we will investigate. We look forward to it. I’m off for some supper. Actually, I think it’s almost lunch
around here, so let’s do it. Bon appétit!